Essentials Weekspotlights unexpected items that make our daily lives just a little bit better.
Diluted,black sex instruction videos dvds freshly-squeezed lemon juice has acquired something of a reputation in our diet-obsessed culture. So before we get to the main reason why I've started chugging six or more pints of the stuff every day, it's important to list the reasons why I'm not.
No, this isn't the "master cleanse" fasting cocktail famously associated with Beyoncé — lemon water, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. While I'm a fan of limited fasting (but don't go beyond 16 hours, people!), I tried this concoction during a fast years ago and found it so disgusting that I quit the fast on the spot. I'm talking about unadulterated lemon water, no sweetener or spice required.
Nor am I doing it to lose weight, although I have done so, or to feel healthier, though I do, or to "flush toxins from the body." Flushing toxins from the body is not a thing, no matter how much your yoga teacher might claim it is. Our livers and kidneys are detoxing all the time regardless. Sure, the extra vitamin C and hydration I'm receiving from lemon water can't hurt — and its citrate has been shown to break down kidney stones — but that's not why I've taken to drinking it in such quantities.
The reason is simple: I'm hooked. In fact, it reminds me of times in my life when I was addicted to soda: Each pint just leads to wanting another. Then, my body was craving the instant bliss of the sugar hit and the thrill of the carbonic acid bite. Now that itch is being scratched by great gulps of zesty liquid goodness. I still can't quite believe this refreshing pause adds just one-twentieth the amount of calories in soda, ounce for ounce. It's gotten to the point where I even prefer it to alcohol.
Over this pandemic year, I've discovered that what I'm craving has a very specific formula. I use a 20-ounce Yeti tumbler — actually, I stole my wife's — because it keeps drinks the coldest for longest and I can tote it anywhere. I add all the ice it can carry, because lukewarm lemon water holds as much excitement as lukewarm soda, and fill the gaps with filtered water. I squeeze in the juice of half a lemon (we'll get to the question of how to do that below), and refill when the tumbler is nothing but ice. To offset concerns about what too much lemon juice might do to tooth enamel, I've recently added a metal straw to my setup.
This is a Goldilocks situation. Anything less than half a lemon's worth of juice leaves it tasting too insipid and watery.
This is a Goldilocks situation. Anything less than half a lemon's worth of juice leaves it tasting too insipid and watery. (I cannot understand why people enjoy water "infused" with lemon slices; maybe my palate isn't refined enough?) Anything more and the flavor has tipped over the line into bitterness. But the juice of half a small lemon — usually purchased at Trader Joe's for 39 cents a pop — seems to be just right.
I've tried limes, but they don't quite hit the spot. I still keep one of those sad plastic lemons in the fridge in case I run out of the real thing, but they usually contain sulfur dioxide as a preservative. Sulfites have been shown to trigger allergic reactions and inhibit the growth of good gut bacteria. Besides, you don't get the pulpy bits, which is part of what I love.
At the suggestion of readers, I've also tried juicing a ton of lemons at once and putting the resulting juice in ice cube trays. It's not a bad solution, as it means I can control the ratio easily — a half a lemon per cube — but after a while I discovered lemon ice cubes don't quite hit the spot either. It's the absolute freshness of a just-sliced lemon that my body seems to find so addictive.
A word about my weight loss: I can't entirely ascribe it to the lemon water. I saw a rise in weight for the first few months of the pandemic (like just about everyone else, we were making our own sourdough bread), which was arrested by a reset-button month on the Whole30 diet. But it didn't trend downwards until September, when I started running a (masked) 5K every day and craving lemon water even more as a result. So it's hard to disconnect the effects of exercise and lemony liquid for me. Your mileage may vary.
Related Video: Which is the best alternative milk for a latte?
What I can tell you is that I'm down about 10 pounds on the year — and that's without imposing any kind of calorie restrictions. I eat what I want, and I probably eat less of it than before. (Studies show the more you hydrate, the less room you have for food.)
More importantly, I feel great. My LDL (bad cholesterol) is the lowest it's ever been clocked. I haven't suffered so much as a sniffle since January, although admittedly I'm less likely to catch colds given all the quarantine time. My skin is the best it's looked in a decade, glowing skin being another reputed effect of lemon water, according to dermatologists.
But again, I don't really think about this stuff. I'm not making some special effort to be virtuous. I'm just doing, and drinking, what my body craves. And loving something healthy is by far the most sustainable way to make a lifestyle change.
Squeeze my lemon
You could say I've been lemon juice-curious since 2010. That's when I read the bestselling book Born to Run, about the distance-running tribe in Mexico known as the Tarahumara. Their energy drink of choice is chia iskiate: lemon juice in water with marinated chia seeds, basically. I tried making this densely nutritious drink once or twice, but didn't have the patience to wait for the chia seeds to fluff up in the fridge.
I started squeezing lemons on food in 2019 after watching the Netflix cooking show Salt Fat Acid Heat; it's one of the easiest, tastiest ways to add the essential acid tang to any meal. But I didn't think about lemon water until a friend and former colleague (who says she has always added lemon to everything she eats since childhood, even pizza) tweeted about an interview with Amy Sedaris. The comedian notes that she juices a lemon every morning, on the advice of fellow actor Justin Theroux.
At the time I was looking for something, anything, that would make me want to drink a pint of water first thing in the morning. I couldn't stop thinking about how much the brain shrivels up overnight due to dehydration, and the cognitive effects that can result. Lemon juice seemed as good a way to make me hydrate as any.
But first I was faced with the biggest pain in the ass of the lemon lifestyle: how to turn it into liquid with minimal waste. Basically, you have two choices: Squeezing and reaming.
(This is as good a point as any to note that you can't discuss this subject without dabbling in double entendres. Not for nothing is it the basis for the world's raunchiest blues lyric, appropriated by Led Zeppelin: "squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg." We'll try to get through it regardless.)
Squeezing is how I started, with the uber-basic standard lemon squeezer many of us already have in our kitchen. But it wasn't nearly efficient enough. Juice sometimes sprayed out the side, and a pulpy mess remains in the squeezer when I'd rather it was in my drink (meanwhile, seeds would occasionally squeeze through the holes in the squeezer that are designed to keep them out). Then I tried a basic plastic lemon reamer, which was even less efficient in the amount of juice it produces (and still has the seed problem).
And so began a journey to try every kind of squeezer and reamer I could get my hands on. I ventured into the world of electric lemon reaming with a Cuisinart pulp-control citrus juicer. It did indeed extract all of that tasty pulp by reaming in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions; the half-lemon rinds were left impossibly smooth. But you had to wash out its reservoir to get all the contents, and the noise of its motor made it prohibitive to use at night.
SEE ALSO: Nuun electrolytes are for more than just working outFor a while afterwards, I used a stainless steel version of a large-handled lemon squeezer. It is deep enough that there's no spray, and seeds rarely get as far as the spout. I'd bought a hefty aluminum version at the beginning of the pandemic, and was shocked to discover months later that the citric acid had eaten through the metal to something black and nasty underneath. Steel didn't have that problem, but it was lighter and less productive in quantity of juice.
I would have tried one of the commercial-grade citrus presses, but for the fact that every version offered on Amazon seems to have attracted recent negative reviews. I was tempted by the $130 Breville motorized juicer, which combined a squeezing handle and a reamer underneath. But that's an awful lot of scratch for a squeezer, even if it is a cheaper version of a $200 device.
In the end, my preferred solution was a ridiculously cheap attachment for a device we already had — the classic KitchenAid mixer.
The JE citrus juicer attachment may just be three plastic parts that lock on to the front of your mixer. But the angle of it uses gravity to maximum advantage in a way that those other electric reamers don't. As soon as the seeds are out, I remove the seed tray and let all the delicious pulp drop into my drink (The attachment is just the right height for a Yeti tumbler). The KitchenAid's variable motor control allows me to squeeze more gently and quietly at first, so I barely need the spray guard around the edge. All of which help keeps the attachment so clean, I need only stick it in the dishwasher once a week.
Now I've sorted my squeezing, the only task that remains is to keep spreading the word of the iced lemon water cult. Just try it for a week, and you may also become hooked on its taste to the point where you don't ever need to drink anything else. Your body can thank you later.
UPDATE: April 26, 2021, 3:39 p.m. PDT This post was originally published on December 8, 2020. It has been updated with fresh lemon-squeezing options.
Read more from Essentials Week
I love my embarrassing lumbar support pillow
The wild world of VRChat is a joyful antidote to these dark times
Tricking out your iOS group texts is worth the tiny bit of effort